Workshop 1 – COLLECT / CATEGORIZE:
Workshop 2 – OBSERVE/PROPOSE:
Workshop 3 – MAKE/TEST:
Reflection
I spent a lot of time at the beginning of this ARP project getting lost and going in circles. I found the process extremely frustrating; I knew what I was interested in, but I felt like I was being made to squeeze it into a form that I did not understand. Throughout this PG Cert experience, I have felt like I am on the outside. Never fully understanding what it is we are trying to achieve and how we are expected to achieve it. In reflection I think this attitude comes from my own lack of confidence in myself as an academic. I came to academia recently and almost by mistake, I feel like I have not yet earned my place at the table.
Having sat on the fence for a long time, come November, it was time to jump into the process. I found my progress was being inhibited by my anxiety around what the project should or could be, so instead I decided to leap blindly into the process and see what would happen. My skillset is in running live collaborative projects, so that is where I began.
When I started, I did not realise that what I was embarking on was ‘participatory action research’, whereby the student participants would be active researchers. Upon further reading, I realised that this mode of research aligns closely with the work I do both inside and outside UAL through live projects. To me, this is the only relevant mode of research, whereby those being researched are involved in the process and able to direct the course of the research towards what is relevant and meaningful for them.
Relinquishing control
When I started the process, I had a vision of the form the research would take. Not a clear vision, but a direction. I called upon a live project methodology I have frequently used in co-design in my position as project manager at MATT+FIONA. This stepped methodology involves a series of workshops to develop the brief, design and make the intervention.
I set out this methodology over three workshops and invited students to participate.
In my mind, the issue I wanted to raise was around the use of the studio, to me, the maker space needed improvement and systematising. The materials seemed haphazardly stored and chaotic. I imagined this project would take the form of creating some sort of system that would create more organisation. After the first workshop, I was surprised to hear from the students that they felt the space worked well. There were always materials available to use and they did not find any issue with the organisation of the space. The conversation turned more to thinking about what materials are not re-used in the studio but the ones that are discarded.
I was at once excited and daunted by this change of direction. In my mind, we were going to create a physical intervention that would change the way the space was used. However, this new direction opened the door to more propositional work. In reflection, I think I felt pressure for the project to be a success, and to be relevant, useful and innovative. Reading further around PAR, I found a quote which changed this mindset.
‘Rather than simply observing and studying, PAR tries to make sense of the world through a collective effort to transform it.’
I realised that we were simply a group of individuals, linked to a communal space, that were reflecting on how we could improve it. The effort was there, whether the outcome was successful or not was in some regard irrelevant.
Student Expectation vs. Is it PAR?
I was really pleased that 10 students signed up to be part of the project, through conversations with them it seemed the main source of motivation was to be part of a ‘making project’ rather than the research aspect. In discussions around what data would be collected and how it would be reflected upon for the research, the students were less interested, it was the process of the project itself which they were motivated by. In an ideal world, PAR would have the participants involved in every stage of the research. However, the scale of this project and the number of interactions with the students limited the scale of their involvement. I had set out the intention of involving the students in the data collection and reflection, however this did not come to fruition. In reflection, rather than trying to be pure to PAR, I should have been more systematic in my method of data collection from the beginning.
What is the data?
It wasn’t until half way through the workshops that what the data was became apparent to me. I struggled with finding examples of research projects that aligned with the project I was undertaking and so I felt unclear in my methodology and understanding what the data would be for this type of project. Was it the conversations had, was it a reflective survey done at the end, was it the physical things we produced? It was in one of our group tutorials that I had a Eureka moment, I realised that the physical materials we were collecting, observing, categorizing and re-imagining was the dataset.
This waste plastic, was the area of our focus, our aim was to collect it and transform it into something. In doing this we were addressing the research questions –